Microsoft Azure

Windows Azure has had a positive impact on meeting our objective. It has allowed us to get-to-market much sooner than if we had stood up the hardware and hosted the applications in-house.

It has also allowed us to decrease FTE resources as it allows a single architect to stand up and maintain an entire enterprise environment pretty easily.

Our main challenge with windows Azure is identifying compute costs. Although we have tried to anticipate costs, there were times where we did not account for some compute time and came in very low with our estimates.

Our first solution added to Azure is a long shot service offering. That said, we could not afford to sink a lot of money into something which may have a long tail to revenue. Azure has allowed us to launch this project for less than $50 per month and enabled us to test this concept to see if there is more demand for it out there.

Reduces the need to manage hardware

Less frequent backups needed

Lessened the need to buy metal server infrastructure for the ongoing development in SharePoint (saved on capital costs)

Saved me time from building development servers as we have automated that for users with a Self Service (increased employee efficiency)

One of our key success stories with Azure is with our client who is in UK. When we migrated our application to Azure the performance level increased 10 fold. This is a direct quote from our customer - Nathan Au, Project Manager for FareShare Brighton and Hove noted: “We use Aidmatrix’ SCM4Hunger to help receive, warehouse and dispatch food to our hunger agencies every day. We know we run high transaction volumes, especially during peak times each week. When Aidmatrix moved to the Microsoft Azure Cloud it was like night and day for us. We saw dramatic performance improvement in response times on average of 4x faster, in some situations it went as high as 10x. It’s amazing what a difference running the same application on the Azure Cloud can make. Now we can focus that much more time on getting food to those who are hungry.”

Second success story is moving our Microsoft Replication Server to Azure Cloud for our SCM4Good Offline application. As our customers are in remote areas in Africa they need to sync their offline app with our replication server. The syncing time has dramatically reduced with Azure and produces less errors.

Quicker turnaround of deployments

Better customer self-service

Faster development and release cycle. This was a huge opportunity for the organization to be able to continuously deployment applications without having any customer downtime. No more maintenance windows. Position yourself for being always on to the customer. Improves customer satisfaction.

Pay only for what you need - shutdown what you don't need/use

Requires some organization changes to fully develop a DevOps function. Also requires lots of scripting but we found a good 3rd party vendor for that. The point is that it's just not a technical exercise -- takes planning and commitment.

We've taken the burden off of our client's IT department by creating a web app to mange business rather than a Windows app. This is much easier to push mass application releases.

The users love the new system because of how fast things operate.

Decreased the time and effort required to provision new infrastructure.

Disaster recovery scenarios are more cost effective to create since a new datacenter is not required

The biggest advantage Azure has had for us is in the procurement pipeline, we no longer have to worry about ordering dedicated servers for most of our projects as it's just a matter of having someone who holds the right keys.

Improved development speed

Lowered infrastructure costs

Quick ROI given the low capital expense.

Allowed us to be truly agile model given the flexibility of using all the features of the solution with low procurement cost and time.

Helped us implement YAGNI and achieve design simplicity

We found that this agile YAGNI model helped us keep all the teams up to speed with the solution as we can dissipate targeted message instead of a large complex soluition